The Pitt University Library System has ended its subscription to RefWorks and is promoting the use of Mendeley, a free and open source research management tool. Tech Crunch has an excellent post today that explains what Mendeley is and how it is affecting academic research. Mendeley's open source, free software differs from other research platforms. The post says that "most academic online networks remain locked up by academic publishers (such as Elsevier) with expensive licensing agreements for universities... (T)he difference between the way it (Mendeley) and Elsevier approaches the academic world is thrown into sharp relief today with the news that Mendeley’s third-party app eco-system is fast approaching three times the size of Elseviers’. This amounts to the difference between an open and closed approach to apps." The story goes on the provide the statistics that Mendeley now covers 65 million documents, compared to Thomson Reuters' 49 million and Elsevier's 47 million.
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